Imaginary Space Research Articles

The Experiential Museum – Avant-Garde Spatial Experiments and the Reorganization of the Human Sensorium

Avant-garde artistic experiments are unquestionably recognized as relevant to the museum field in the context of art and museum studies. This paper aims to reconfirm their relevance in the architectural context as well, selecting crucial cases and protagonists whose final products were not artworks or exhibitions per se, but new (concepts of) space. These new concepts of space were all treated as democratic and participatory new media capable of training and modernizing the whole of our human sensorium. In this way, a curious partnership is discovered between this “experiential” art museum and the discourse on architectural modernity. Imaginary space, expressionist space, correlational space, multimedia space and situationist space – these are the principal categories that this paper recognizes as five distinct productive devices for modernist perceptual reorganization.

(Im)mobilities, waiting and professional aspirations: The career lives of highly skilled Syrian refugees in Switzerland

This article contributes to emerging research on the dynamics of mobility and immobility in forced migration through a special focus on the experience of waiting in refugees’ professional life. Wide research across the social sciences explores the dynamic relationship between migration control systems and migrants’ experiences of time through the analytical lens of “waiting”. However, it missed considering how the experience of waiting impinges on the professional lives of refugees and how refugees act upon this condition vis-à-vis their work aspirations despite career and social immobility. This article aims to fill this gap by exploring the specific case of Syrian refugees in Switzerland and their experiences of waiting in the context of their highly skilled and professional lives. The immobility inherent to the experience of waiting also becomes a space for imagination, to confront the present condition and aspire for a better future.

Caught in the In-between: The Seen and Unseen Forms of Care Among Filipino/Filipino-American Immigrants Navigating Built and Imagined Spaces

Author(s): Yutuc, Jenina | Abstract: Beyond the built space of a hospital, many forms of care often go unseen, unnoticed, and undervalued. This reimagining of care, through the exploration of its different forms beyond health institutions, aims to expand on the definition put forth by Joan Tronto, which defined care broadly through the agencies of bodies, the self, and built and natural environments. This paper advocates for an understanding of care beyond the hospital and the clinic through the lived experiences of Pre-Health UC Berkeley Filipinos and Filipino-Americans in built and imagined spaces. Built spaces are the spaces (i.e the hospital, clinic, medical mission site, and community health center) that are (1) designed by architects, (2) physically built, and (3) lived in. Imagined spaces (linguistic, cultural, memory, in-between, and home) are spaces that are unseen and unbuilt but are fundamentally produced and reproduced in, along with shaping the social relations within built spaces. The main findings suggest that architectural, built spaces of the hospital, community health center, homeland, and cultural center must not only render the unseen forms of care visible. Participants noted that the in-betweenness they experienced played a salient role in their immigrant experience and caring practices as they navigated built and imagined spaces. Through their lived experiences navigating both built and imagined spaces, this study aims to contribute towards forms of care that validate these multi-layered and multi-sited imagined spaces as valued spaces for underrepresented communities to feel seen, represented, and cared for within the “white spatial imaginary” (Lipsitz 2007, 13).

Unsettling intimacies:Re-cognizing ecological relations with the work of Jean Clandinin


 For Jean Clandinin, narrative inquiry is not about being but becoming and as such posits knowledge as a continuous, non-teleological process rather than a static object. Experiential knowledge, for Clandinin, then, is intimately bound up with the vicissitudes of lived experience. If stories make meaning from experience, they open up an imaginative space through which researchers can come to understand experience as well as the knowledge that emerges from it or re-cognize such. Inquiring into experiential knowledge through narratives is valuable for research, and particularly for research that engages ecological crises, because it enables a more robust, nuanced view of life—both human and nonhuman—to emerge. Further, as Clandinin’s work reconfigures the role of the researcher, it unsettles hierarchical assumptions within the research space, allowing for collaboration, polyphonic texts, and reconfigured understandings to emerge. Clandinin’s work troubles dominant narratives about knowledge that presuppose conceptual reification and mastery. As such, narrative inquiry has the potential to support research that is interested in reconfiguring relationships between human and non-human “nature” in ways that do not necessarily fit into dominant narratives about knowledge in education. Using a framework informed by contemporary eco-criticism and trauma theory, I consider how narrative inquiry might offer reparative methods for educational research that engages ecological crises. As narrative inquiry aims to honour the particularity of experience and promote growth without assimilating plurality into an objective singularity, its methods have the capacity to provide insights into ecological relations that are critical, self-reflexive, and ethically responsive.

Heterophotographies: play, power, privilege and spaces of otherness in Chinese tourist photography

ABSTRACT This article explores Han Chinese tourists' practice of self-photography in ‘ethnic' ‘costume' at tourist sites in China and Japan. Drawing on ethnography and interviews with young Han women, it aims to problematise the innocence of such play. Contextualising this analysis with the visualisation of identity within China, this article explores how the playful mode itself allows for Han individuals to position themselves as ‘sophisticated' in their consumption of traditional cultures, while tacitly separating them from the supposed ‘traditionality' of other groups. Drawing on Huizinga's ‘magic circle’ and Foucault's concept of ‘heterotopias’, it is argued that the imaginative space that is created is not at the tourist location, but rather within the confines of the images themselves. Analysing the ways in which tourists play out their ideas of ‘ethnic others', it explores the tropes within the photographs, and how these link to wider practices of ‘othering'. The article explores the ways in which ‘play' renders cultural difference ‘safe'-because-‘not serious’ – but also positions those in a privileged position to safely play with different cultures supposedly superior in their ability to do so.

Soundtrack in Modern Cinema

The purpose of the research is to analyze popular examples of modern cinema music to determine the features of its interaction with various elements of screen text, taking into account the applied nature and applying various relevant approaches to the study of soundtracks. The research methodology consists in the application of a set of methods for theoretical analysis of film music, their interaction with internal and external factors of influence on the formation of the viewer’s image-emotional sphere in conditions of purposeful perception of the storyline of modern cinema. The scientific novelty lies in the fact that for the first time the peculiarities of the music functioning in modern cinema were analyzed, the main trends in the development of film music in the socio-cultural conditions of our time were revealed, and film music from the perspective of the viewer as a “non-ideal” evaluator of soundtracks in modern cinema was also considered. Conclusions. The article, using various methodological approaches, has proved that film music in the framework of interaction with screen text manifests itself as a significant tool, expanding the artistic space of the film. Film music can go beyond direct acoustic information, reflecting the narrative and conceptual components of the work of art as a whole. A practical example of the manifestation of modern film music is the use of timbral colours as an instrument for revealing the context of events, time, and the image of a hero; leitmotif; experiments with the technical side of sound through the expansion of the imaginary space of the screen. The main trends in the development of film music in the socio-cultural conditions of our time are due to the release of soundtracks beyond the boundaries of a practical film instrument. The modern soundtrack occupies a significant part of the cultural space of music and culture in general. This position is facilitated by the composer’s conceptual approach, the style integrity of the work and the relative independence of the soundtrack in the general cultural space. The rating of soundtracks is given by the audience and depends on their aesthetic preferences and the level of musical “experience”. Soundtracks must meet the requirements of modern cinema and common cultural space, which contributes to the success of the film.

Inquietudine e disincanto tra i banchi: Un anno di scuola di Giani Stuparich dal racconto al film

Recent historiographical perspectives dedicated to collective school memory have opened new research avenues in the way the cultural industry depicted the school, teachers, and students. This contribution follows such direction and intends to tackle the process of stratified transformations that interwove around Giani Stuparich’s narrative Un anno di scuola, (1929). This literary work resulted from a dialogue between the individual memory of the writer and the collective memory of youth during the first decade of 1900. Shared and individual memories within the cultural context of a Mitteleuropean and irredentist Trieste leave their traces in the literary work, and at the same time expand through time in the numerous editions of the text, as well as in the movie by Franco Giraldi released in 1977. The description of the school, teachers, and students is transformed into a space for imagination, where writing and re-writing influence each other, thus modifying the knowledge of the past. As a result, the past moves from one generation to the next in a dynamic flow, open to new interpretations.

Your (Internet) Connection Is Unstable

Your (Internet) Connection Is Unstable

Fabrication, microstructure, and hydration of nano β-Ca2SiO4 powder by co-precipitation method

As the main component of belite cement, nanosizing (decreasing the average particle sizes) of β-C2S is one of the important methods to improve its activity. In this paper, nano β-Ca2SiO4 (β-C2S) powders were synthesized by co-precipitation method which was a facile and easy route. Ca(NO3)2, Tetraethyl orthosilicate (TEOS), and NaOH were used as calcium source, silicon source, and precipitant respectively to make the precursor, which was then sintered into β-C2S phase at 700-1100 °C. The synthesized powders were characterized by X-ray diffraction (XRD), Fourier transform infrared (FTIR), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), Brunauer Emmett-Teller (BET), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), and isothermal calorimetry. The results indicated that the sintering temperature had a great influence on the properties of synthesized powders. β-C2S prepared at lower sintering temperature exhibited smaller crystal and particle size, lower crystallinity, higher specific surface area, lower purity (higher f-CaO content) and higher hydration activity. High purity nano-sized β-C2S particles were prepared at sintering temperatures of 900 °C with low relative crystallinity (41.6%), high specific surface area (8.67 m2/g), low f-CaO content (0.66%), nanoparticle size(around 65 nm). Compared with ordinary β-C2S, the hydration activity of nano β-C2S has been greatly improved, which also provides a large imagination space for its future application.

Establishing Early Literacy Habits in a Profit-Driven Digital World.

Books are remarkable objects. They carry children into imaginary spaces and offer parents a familiar script to settle children down at night. Books challenge readers’ minds to stretch their attention span, pause and contemplate, and take others’ perspectives. Early book sharing is promoted by the American Academy of Pediatrics because of its clear impact on reading scores, which predict high school graduation rates.1Since the introduction of television, early childhood experts have wondered whether time spent in pleasurable but “minds-off” screen experiences displaces reading. Studies using time use diaries and surveys offered conflicting evidence2,3 but suggested that educational television was linked with more reading in stressed families.4However, the digital ecosystem has changed dramatically in the past two decades. Children can find their favorite programs on demand in any room of the house or moment of boredom. Myriad digital products marketed to children provide engaging interactivity but often have low educational value and high advertising load.5 By algorithmically predicting what children might click on next, platforms are able to extend viewing time and make billions in profits.6With this engagement-promoting digital ecosystem in mind, updated research evidence about children’s reading and media habits is needed, particularly in developmentally sensitive windows when such habits are established. In this issue of Pediatrics, McArthur et al7 present findings from a large birth cohort in which reading and screen use were assessed at 24, 36, and 60 months of age. The children were born in 2008–2010, so they likely had access to smartphones and tablets.With three waves of data, the authors were able to statistically control for between-child confounders (eg, family stress) and isolate within-child variation in screen use and reading over time. They found that more screen use at 24 months of age predicted less shared book reading at 36 months of age (β = –.08), which in turn predicted higher screen use at 60 months of age (β = –.11).These results suggest that toddlerhood may be a key window in which children establish preferences for media over reading as a daily activity, which sets the stage for more screen use around kindergarten entry. Daily toddler habits (eg, sleep and feeding) are influenced by the intense emotionality and self-directed behavior that can dominate this period.8 Therefore, it is possible that toddler demands for media and parents’ related low self-efficacy in establishing daily reading routines may drive this association.Like many large cohort studies, in this study, McArthur et al7 only assessed one dimension of media use: time. Now that media are engineered to engage young viewers through persuasive enhancements, more longitudinal research is needed that interrogates children’s reactions to mobile and interactive design: Are devices coming to bed and meals with them or being grabbed in the moment to calm a tantrum?9 When young children engage with apps and videos, do they go on “autopilot” and expect to follow a frictionless feed, and how does that influence their more friction-full daily interactions with people and learning? Do they take a “minds-on” orientation to screen media, as they would a book?5 As the US government debates potentially increasing funding for children and media research (ie, Children and Media Research Advancement Act),10 these types of questions, and implications for the corporate responsibility of the companies designing children’s digital ecosystems, should be prioritized.

A meta-analysis of the virtual reality problem: Unequal effects of virtual reality sickness across individual differences

Practical applications of virtual reality (VR), defined as a three-dimensional digital representation of a real or imagined space, have become increasingly popular and are now applied in workplace training, physical rehabilitation, psychological therapy, and many other settings. Feelings akin to motion sickness, called VR sickness, can arise from interacting with VR programs, and researchers have shown that certain aspects of the user, such as gender and age, may predict the occurrence of VR sickness. The unequal effects of VR sickness are a dire concern and the application of VR is unfair to certain users if they are prone to sickness. For instance, a workplace VR training program could result in disparate treatment if women experience more VR sickness than men. To investigate this notion, we perform a meta-analysis on the relationship between VR sickness and a wide array of potential antecedents. The results demonstrate that motion sickness susceptibility, gender, real-world experience, technological experience, possessing a neurological disorder, and possessing a relevant phobia all significantly relate to VR sickness; however, no moderating effects produced recurrent significant results. These results were partially explained by the current dominant framework for VR sickness, postural instability theory, but some findings were not predicted by the theory. Therefore, we support that (a) VR sickness produces unequal effects across multiple individual differences; (b) these effects appear resilient across applications of VR programs, and (c) further research is needed to develop theory and identify explanatory mechanisms that detail these relationships.

A cry for Palestine: vocal practice and imaginaries of Palestinian-ness among Chilean football supporters of Club Deportivo Palestino

ABSTRACT Palestino is a football team founded by Palestinian immigrants in Chile in 1916. This article examines how a group of Palestino supporters with no Palestinian heritage understand their sonic practices of football fandom. I argue that they conceptualise their vocalisations as indexing an imaginary wherein the Palestinian experience in the Middle East is marked by struggle and resilience. Disjunctive pro-Palestine images have led them to imagine the feeling of resistance that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict must stir up among Palestinians abroad – an experience they seek to ground in their vocalisations in order to sonically dominate rivals, cheer for Palestino, and express solidarity with and raise awareness about Palestine. In addition to foregrounding the potentials and constraints of sounds that are not overtly political, the article demonstrates the affordances of vocal expressions to bundle transnational elements with local practices and inhabit the resulting imaginative space via performance.

Imaginary Nation of Wakanda in Black Panther: The Neo-colonized African Continent

Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther as a high-profile black superhero film has been lauded especially by African descendants for its features such as diversity of actors and expression of Afrofuturism. As a Hollywood film that is produced under the grand project of Marvel Cinematic Universe, Black Panther is celebrated for representing African (American) characters without distorting them. Thus, in this stance, the film is located within the historical context of African American film production that has long attempted to represent just and empowering images of the Black race. On the other hand, few scholars criticize Black Panther for its way of using African continent which does not differ from popular and everlasting culture prop. Starting from this point, this paper explores in particular the power dynamics surrounding Africa as the Third World via Wakanda as an imaginary space which generates the multi-layered perspectives for approaching the representation of Africa. Although this imaginary nation is supposed to be a leading image of liberating Africa through a cinematic imagination, it only comes to reiterate the existing position which dismisses and devalues African continent since it fails to embrace the continent. In further focusing the relationship among the African, the African American, and Wakanda, this paper also delves into what lies behind the idealistic surface of Black Panther. The detailed examination of the tension between T’Challa, the African, and Killmonger, the African American, will allow this paper to critically engage with Pan-Africanism the film stands for, and concludes that the film, although unintentionally, reinforces U.S. nationalism.

Other worlds: Multirealist writing as a strategy for representing climate crisis

This article advocates for the utility of multirealism for writing about the climate crisis. Seeking to contribute to scholarly debates that have considered realist literary fiction’s capacity to represent climate crisis (Clark, 2015; Ghosh, 2016; Lockwood, 2018; Johns-Putra, 2018), I advocate for a multirealist literary mode. This mode seeks to destabilise the ontological foundations of realism by assembling narratives that draw into focus the other possible worlds that coexist alongside western modernity without resorting to speculative or spectacular digressions that otherwise exceed the bounds of literary realism. In doing so, I advocate for the utility of practice as an imaginative space to radically reimagine the world and our engagements with it without needing to defer to a possible future. My understanding of how the multirealist text represents the ontological crisis wrought by climate catastrophe is informed by my practice-led research as well as the work of other writers and literary scholarship. Specifically, I conduct my discussion here with reference to a range of ecocritical works, before turning my attention to Olga Tokarczuk’s novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (2018), as well as my short story, “A Still Thing Shaken” (2019).

Cuentos Combativos: Decolonialities in Puerto Rican Books About María

Guided by theories of racialization and through a decolonial analysis, we share findings on the examination of four children’s books written in Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Hurricane María. In engaging with these books, we situate our work in communal and research activist practices that foreground Puerto Ricans’ hidden stories and knowledges. Our initial analysis focuses on mapping the complex and contradictory constructions of diverse sociopolitical perspectives within a Puerto Rican imaginary around Hurricane María, communal and historical agency, and emerging resistance as decolonial literary acts. We then provide a more in-depth analysis of two texts, exploring the themes of estamos bien, delinking, one story/one people, and acción social. Findings highlight the need to engage with ruptures created by texts within decolonial imaginative spaces to improve literacy instruction.

Berwick-Barcelona: a case study in creative collaborative approaches to climate change research

ABSTRACT The longstanding relationship between art and geography continues to develop through a “creative re/turn” as more geographers apply creative methodologies within their research, and more artists situate their work within geography discourse. This paper presents a case study of a participatory art working session held in collaboration with Newcastle University Institute for Sustainability that models potential applications of the creative re/turn within Higher Education. Taking climate change as an invitation to innovate and reimagine, the working session brought together researchers, educators and administrators from across the university’s natural and social sciences to use an artistic toolkit to design the fictional new town BWK-BCN (read: Berwick-Barcelona), a town merging Berwick-upon-Tweed on the Scottish borders with Barcelona as a radical adaptation to climate change. The case study identifies key benefits and practical challenges of interdisciplinary approaches to climate change teaching and research. Despite some challenges, this paper suggests that collaborations with participatory art practices can provide the critical reflective and imaginative space to support creative research, learning, and engagement processes essential for tackling the unprecedented complexity that climate change presents.

A meta-analysis of virtual reality training programs

Virtual reality (VR) is the three-dimensional digital representation of a real or imagined space with interactive capabilities. The application of VR for organizational training purposes has been surrounded by much fanfare; however, mixed results have been provided for the effectiveness of VR training programs, and the attributes of effective VR training programs are still unknown. To address these issues, we perform a meta-analysis of controlled experimental studies that tests the effectiveness of VR training programs. We obtain an estimate of the overall effectiveness of VR training programs, and we identify features of VR training programs that systematically produce improved results. Our meta-analytic findings support that VR training programs produce better outcomes than tested alternatives. The results also show that few moderating effects were significant. The applied display hardware, input hardware, and inclusion of game attributes had non-significant moderating effects; however, task-technology fit and aspects of the research design did influence results. We suggest that task-technology fit theory is an essential paradigm for understanding VR training programs, and no set of VR technologies is “best” across all contexts. Future research should continue studying all types of VR training programs, and authors should more strongly integrate research and theory on employee training and development.

Hope against hope: COVID-19 and the space for political imagination

COVID-19 has loosened neoliberalism’s hegemonic grip on the future. Amid the enormous suffering experienced internationally, there is much discussion of how to ‘Build Back Better’, and hope for a more caring, just and sustainable world. But competing futures are being imagined and planned. Hope is never politically neutral, and the content of collective hope is a key site of political struggle. This is partly a question of space: who has the literal and discursive space in which to develop visions of the future? The following article considers the role that cultural studies can play in this struggle. ‘Conjunctural analysis’ has a key task, making visible the competing futures contained within the present. But cultural studies should go further: combining conjunctural analysis with methods drawn from a range of scholarly and activist traditions – including critical pedagogy, devised theatre and the interdisciplinary field of futures studies – that deliberately create spaces for imagining new futures.

Feeling at home: Sound, affect and domesticity on radio soap operas

This article introduces the concept of ‘the everyday implausible’, asserting that, between 1930 and 1960, US radio serial aesthetics produced a tug-of-war between the familiar and the unfamiliar that was simultaneously radical and reactionary. This aesthetic created a space for the listener to place new versions of herself within the narrative, inviting the imagined woman-at-home to re-envisioning the possibilities of reality. However, re-envisioning reality produced its own set of limitations. The sonic features of the radio serial soundscape created imaginary spaces within the home, but these imaginary spaces were – as often as not – also homes, making the potential of escape wholly illusory. In giving attention to the specific aesthetic features of these programmes, this article interrogates the meaningful work produced by a sparse soundscape, alongside an emphasis on domesticity and emotional conversation.

“Feeling-Seeing” inTransparent

This article explores how Jill Soloway uses mirror imagery in the series Transparent to facilitate their version of the female gaze, particularly the tenet of feeling-seeing. By doing so, this article aims to assist ongoing efforts in both transgender studies and media studies research to stretch beyond the in/visibility debate surrounding transgender representation in popular media. It proposes that Soloway’s creative process designates open, imaginative space for audiences (both cisgender and transgender alike) to witness how gender comes to matter for Maura, both in the sense of materializing in bodily form and in a manner of meaning, and how gender also comes to re-matter for her, but perhaps also for audiences watching her transformation.